Fascination with the ugly, morbid and dark as the essence (or, rather, one of the essences) of a book written in so-called autofiction may not be the first thing that comes to mind; the problem with autofiction is often the exact location of the filter.
It is not that the author, or in our space more often in recent years, the author, does not aspire to write in the text with their authentic subjective, individual experience; the problem is simply that every literary text, every expression, passes through some filter, interpretation, experiential prism, and often the genre is an inventory of some limited episode of living experience and its reflection. Eva Mahkovic waives this type of procedure. Toxic is and at the same time not an inventory of Eva Mahkovic’s living experience, in fact the narrator constantly reminds us that it is impossible to do anything we do (including writing autofiction) without constantly performing something or someone.
Toxic is written, as defined by the author, as an autopsy, an examination of the body and “brain garbage” of Eva Mahkovic, the literary character of the book Toxic. Since linearity, both in literature and in life, is merely a way and a tool for sorting reality and everything experienced – not some external given – Mahkovic interweaves the diary form, which implies commanding her own life, with the biographies of women who have addressed her in one way or another, with myths, historical data, letters, personal anecdotes from the past and, of course, a reflection of myself in this collage.
Toxic is an autofiction hybrid, a wide and by no means random set of genres that appear in it, and it is again with the concepts of girlhood or the question of gender – often or always it is also inextricably linked. A diary entry is thus something that is stereotypically associated with girlhood, with the expression of emotional states of girls, which are otherwise often understood as unimportant – both in private spaces and in the wider society – and which have no place other than in a diary. Biographies of women, similar to historically and mythologically colored passages, are attempts to fill the holes that exist in the recording of women’s destinies – the key here is the connection between history, women who lived decades and centuries ago or existed only in myths, and the present. Mahkovic asserts it by recounting the life experiences of women who are still living.
What is perhaps particularly important here is that Mahkovic does not categorize the women she writes about along class lines; among them we find very diverse personalities belonging to very different environments and living very different lives. On the one hand, for example, he writes about Taylor Swift, on the other hand, about anchorites. All the references in Toxic are women, women and their experiences and what marked Mahkovic’s relation to them. Toxic is a text that places women at the center of the spiritual world (there is an interesting figure of the Virgin Mary, which appears not only in the text, but also in its artistic image), as well as at the center of the artistic sphere, pop culture and everyday life. This tracing is perhaps most explicit with the list of views, feelings, beliefs about oneself and the world, and anecdotes of Eva Mahkovic.
With these literary procedures, Mahkovic constantly places herself – or rather herself, as she performs herself through Toxic – among other characters, among their lives and in the social context that they have in common by gender. It almost completely avoids theorizing or analyzing the fate of women in modern society; instead, it gives us a complete world of girlhood and womanhood.
This world is dark, often relegated to a blandness that never comes and cannot come without pain and a hole in the body and soul of the person who takes on the world and the capitalist order of the society in which they find themselves. He warns us that it is impossible not to take it upon ourselves, that it is impossible to completely tear ourselves away from it, and here is the first crack that turns “pink” into a virtually infinitely empty, always insufficient, gloomy life experience that but it’s not – and Toxic shows this perfectly – so much Eva Mahkovic’s thing as the experience of being a girl, being a woman.
Where Mahkovic, on the other hand, is distinctly personal, she remains in line with the essentiality of the body, the experience of the body for a woman, and here we encounter wonderfully dark and at the same time beautiful, distinctly poetic descriptions of inner states and exquisite metaphors. With this, he not only describes his most intimate experiences, which is often the case in autofiction, but pours into them what is perhaps even the most subjective, some of his inner images and pictures and visualizations, which, together with personal experiences and opinions, have a very expressive and semantic power.
From the show From the book market.
Source: Rtvslo
